Steve and his wife were checking out at the supermarket when they noticed something odd about the cashier packing his bags. She was ramming all his groceries like she was trying to repair a levy in a flood.
Then he looked at her face. She looked tired, ragged, and distraught. He looked around the rest of the checkout area. All the other cashiers looked similarly haggard, and were stuffing groceries just as fast.
Steve asked her to slow down, worried that she would break his eggs. With grim resolve, she shook her head no. Steve asked again. Again, no. Management had announced that the slowest cashier would be fired.
Both he and his wife were filled with “nauseating disgust,” said Steve. “Here I am buying free range eggs,” considered by some to be a more progressive and socio-economically conscious purchasing decision, “from a company that treats its workers like this.”
Perhaps if the supermarket wants to motivate its employees, they should fire whoever came up with the “mush! mush!” idea and redistribute their salary evenly amongst the cashiers.
When it comes to buyer perception these days, the ends do not justify the means even in the pursuit of customer service, in this case, faster bagging. If in the name of serving your customers better you treat your employees like garbage, and customers find out, they will punish you for it. How you get there is just as important as where you get to.
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That’s…pretty amusing. “Here I am, making a very important decision about eggs that may save the planet, and yet these people are working very hard. I am going to hop in my Prius, drive right past Starbucks and blog about this on my iPad.”
What you saw is what 90% of America is experiencing right now. A dude at work just got fired because he is the “slowest so-and-so”. Nevermind the fact he is only like 10% behind the rest of us, and everyone has their own style, etc…the company wants the fastest, so even though he’s been here like 2+ years…buh-bye. Every company wants the fastest person that will raise the least amount of resistance when forced to work 50-60 hours a week, while making the fewest mistakes.
Costco, the store beloved by many, not only tracks items per minute per cashier, they put the numbers on a giant wipe-off board on the wall where everyone can see it.
There is no avoiding it, for customers or workers.
I think that sucks. High IPM or not is not why I shop at Costco and as a customer I don’t care if the cashier is on the top of the list or not. Why Costco wastes time embarrassing their workers is beyond me. I thought Costco was supposed to care more about their employees than typical retailers. But apparently not all the time.
Add me to the “What store was it folks” list. Without that info this story isn’t much good to anyone.
Think of it like this. The fates come down to you and tell you that unless you drive more carefully, you will die in a car crash in the next month. Is this unfair to give you control of your own destiny. Ask all the people that were laid off without warning if they would have liked this chance to keep their jobs and see what they would say. My wife would have liked this chance two years ago. This strikes me as socioeconomic snobbery. I think Steve thinks that they are just “baggers” so they shouldn’t have to compete. Unlike college students applying for colleges which exclude the lowest or doctors applying for residency. The hospitals don’t take the lowest ranked.
But do they just measure the surgeons on who can operate the fastest?
If that was the main determinate on what kept the patient alive then, yes. In this case the speed of bagging is the main part of the activity they perform.
There’s a lot more to checking groceries than bagging/checking speed —- they are handling a variety of transactions {alcohol & tobacco age checks, selling stamps, selling lottery tickets, taking and confirming the veracity of coupons, providing basic customer service (did you find everything, answering questions about the products)}. They also need to balance a cash drawer.
Measuring just by transaction time is lazy management. A good manager knows the best and worst cashiers by all measures and should know how to improve their performance. Most of the factors that drive speed are outside the control of the workers themselves. Read a little W. Edwards Deming to get some insight into management styles like the store in this post.
AMEN as a whipped on AMEN
Sounds like Super Club. And Dax Shepard is gonna win!
Well the IPM certainly explains why the cashiers are always logging in and out of their machines. I always thought it was so they wouldn’t forget and walk away while the till was still active. As far as an IPM calculation it should be based on first item until last item before payment. Not overall items divided by time logged in.
I am with everyone else, we need to know what store this is, or at least what chain it is and where it is. At the very minimum articles should tell the readers what state a problem store is in (aka I went to a best buy in MA and had a problem). For all I know this could be about a store in China where they have different working conditions than in the USA.
Real or not, good or bad (I think bad) – that’s the way it is in an employers market. Lots of people waiting in line for a job.
MUSH DRONES or be replaced!!!
This article should have been titled “A business did something to a person” followed by comments like “Why would a person use a business, they deserve what they got.”
This is likely BECAUSE it’s an “eco-friendly” store and product. All Natural products are a higher costs, and there is only two places those costs are pushed to, and that’s either the customer or the labor. If the consumer is unwilling to pay for the same product at the higher value, then the labor costs will be cut to recoup. If you are laid off it doesn’t save on labor, since the employee has to put money out via taxes. If you are fired for not being able to fulfill your job position (items per minute) then no unemployement, and costs have been effectively cut.
She must be the cashier of the month with the fastest IPM posing with her prize of a dozen green bananas?
That pic made me want to eat a bottle of anti-depressants. Maybe the Brangelina Adoption Agency can adopt her.
Wow this is stupid. Sure, if you need to lay off someone due to financials, that’s life with a real business. Getting rid of the lowest performing person makes sense.
Setting an idiotic metric that results in an overall decrease in customer satisfaction is not the right way to go about it. Shoving the canned goods on top of the eggs as fast as possible while crushing my bread with the watermelon cause that’s what was closest might be fast, but it’s not GOOD.
Name names. For the love of god name names.
If it weren’t for the free market forces the cashiers would be wasting their time and their employers/shareholders profits!
profit, profit, profit…if morals and ethics get in the way of maximum profits then a publicly traded corporation has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to ignore any moral or ethical qualms it may face. FACT, thank you.
No name = didn’t happen.
*sigh* IPM’s… I remember those, I worked at an Office Supply Store once where we were trained to scan items without letting them touch the table, it had to go from hand to bag because that saved .8 seconds whatever that is. When that is your first retail job, getting out of that speedy habit that makes you look like an insane lunatic behind the register trying to race other cashiers is a pretty tough thing to break. Sadly I do the same thing at self check-outs when i’m shopping elsewhere… it weirds the employees out who watch me. : x
Did he drop a “redistribute the wealth”?
we know who this guy votes for…lol
PS: what store is it?????????
Oh yeah, I remember when people used to bag my groceries! I moved to Germany 4 months ago, and here no one bags your groceries. The cashier scans your stuff through fast as lightning and you bag yourself. Some stores have a separate bagging area, so you just collect your groceries in a box at checkout and move them to the shelf away from the registers in order to bag more carefully. But I guess the Germans can only get away with this because people don’t buy that much when they shop and instead shop a few times a week.
In other news, a credit card company has decided to sell the numbers in their database. Oh, and, “Tonight on Action News, a bomb is in the air and expected to land at 10. See which city, at 11.”
Totally useless article.
There are a lot of issues beyond a cashier’s control that can f–k up their Items Per Minute:
* The customer who – only after the total is displayed – opens a purse the size of a 55-gallon drum and starts trying to find her money.
* The same customer adding insult to injury by adding an additional two minutes trying to find loose coins so she gets an even dollar amount back as change.
* Old-style paper WIC vouchers. Unlike debit card-based benefits, the cashier has to verify the correct quantity and dollar amount of the eligible items. I stood in line at Kroger one night for 15 minutes while this played out with the customer in front of me. (On top of everything else, the bitch drove away in an almost new Lexus! I drive a 9 year old Honda.)
* Pricing errors. Anytime an item scans for more than the posted price there’s always at least a 5 minute wait for someone to verify the tag.
Although the law of averages dictates these problems will be spread equally among all cashiers, sometimes one will draw the unlucky short straw for a few days in a row. Why fire a cashier over the actions of people who slow down the line for everyone?
PS: Like others, I also nominate this story for the Golden Poo “Redacted” award. The whole point of reading The Consumerist is to learn the truth – not redact it.
perhaps consumerist can’t tell us the name of the place for some legal reason… but can you tell us why the supermarket’s name is redacted?
Writer of article: YOU ARE A progressive and socio-economically conscious DOUCHE BAG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, and it has nothing to do with how the store treats it’s clerks.
I’ve heard about this from a variety of places, such as Wal-mart and Target. Most of the grocery stores around here are union and wouldn’t be able to fire based on speed, no matter what.
thats why i always make sure to recommend staff that goes beyond
sure, nothing can be done if the price is what it is, or an item is out of stock, but if the worker tries their best they should get recognized, chances are, some stupid executive in a posh office makes up all these crazy rules w/o even setting foot in a store
Ther’es no point in this article if we don’t know which supermarket it was.
Does this article really surprise anyone? American management is currently in the “I don’t give a shit” phase. This generation of management does not care what you think, how you think, and why you think; it’s all about greed.
These employee’s are pushed by management, which in turn management is pushed by their managers, and the ladder runs up to the top because the number one big boss probably has a wife and four kids living off the backs of the employee’s and these same employee’s are busting their asses paying off the top guy’s new yacht, 5000 sq ft home, a beamer and the all the electronic gadgets given the to kids every Christmas. Of course, the wife is shopping and spending $5k a month on herself so that bill needs to be paid too.
Just sayin.
It sounds like an MBA drank the “metrics is gospel” kool-aid, and forgot that there are other items to evaluate an employee on. It also sets up a conflict between the idea of “take the time to do the job right” with “try to get as much accomplished in a shift”. It ends up being a quality verses quantity conflict, and too many MBAs seem to be more interested in quantity over quality.
Here’s the thing. You don’t tell everyone “we’re gonna fire the slowest cashier”. You just observe and see who’s doing the worst job — there might be a cashier slightly slower than the rest, but his or her customer service skills are superior than the 20-something who bags like lightning, but can’t seem to add up anything manually in his head.
Sounds like management relying too much on their spreadsheets and not really doing their job…oh, wait, I think I just found the person they were looking for…
And this is why I don’t mind tipping the baggers at the on base commissary. I don’t have a problem tipping because they actually bag how I’d like it to be bagged, ie: perishables together, soaps and cleaners together, and my bread isn’t squished. They also load the heavy things on the bottom of my trunk and not on top of my bread. Cakes I buy also remain right side up, not on the side like has happened other places. I guess if they were crappy they just wouldn’t get any tips and they would quit.
Hope they do fire the slowpoke. Too many people at entry level positions aren’t held to the fire like they should. These are the things one has to do if they want quality help.
Back when I worked at Winn Dixie I was the fastest cashier in our store, the computer maxed out at 60 items a minute. Management encouraged the rest of us to try to speed up as they averaged like 10. When we used to be open til 12 the office would stop me at 11:30 and I couldn’t run again til they ran ‘end of day’ on the computer. Customers would start lining up and getting angry and I was just like don’t worry you’ll be out faster then you think. They were happy when they left. And in the 2 years I worked there I only broke a bottle of Caro syrup because I had to much backspin on it when it crossed my scanner. Needless to say I wasn’t usually on express lane duty, I smoked the big orders out the door.
Business names or it didn’t happen! When did this website fall down the slippery slide of “We won’t share the business name” I come here to find out which businesses I should be a patron of and which to avoid. Articles like this are NOT HELPFUL. How do we expect this grocery to change if we can’t shame them into change or at the very least decide with our money and shop elsewhere?
I’m curious too, but boycotting the whole chain is senseless. It’s just one branch that were all being douches. I would boycott that store, but not the while chain. How can the company keep track of everything goin on in every store. I’m pretty sure if it were a chain, they wouldn’t allow it
And I bet you still bought those groceries.